Many-Seed Bread

We love bread with "nutty things". They add nutrition but best of all they are delicious! This bread had lots of flavor and wholesome goodness.

This bread can be made into a free formed "french style" loaf or in a loaf pan. I like free formed loaves to slice and eat with a bowl of soup. To make a hearty sandwich or great peanut butter and jelly toast, the loaf pan works best.

My changes (because I can't even let a great recipe alone without making some substitutes!) I replaced 2 cups of whole wheat flour for the white and added 2 T vital gluten. I increased the water by one half cup making the total water, 2 cups. The flour to water ratio seemed about perfect. I'm slowly learning how much additional water to add when I replace white flour with whole wheat.

So far this has been one of our favorite recipes from this book and I've made it more then once!

The recipe says it goes great with peanut butter and jelly, so made this recipe because I love PB&J for lunch.

The recipe says it makes 2 loaves. I split the dough in 2 and wanted to make sandwich loaves. Unfortunately, ½ the recipe only yielded 700g instead the recommended 794g from the recipe for sandwich bread pans in a smaller bread pan. I need to investigate what is causing me to lose roughly 10% of the expected yield.

I investigated further and the entire recipe is 1434g, so I was not far off with my yield. It would be nice if the total yield was used more often throughout the recipe description, so you didn’t have to find out the hard way. For example, if the recipe says it produces 2 loaves of bread, it should say 2 loaves assuming "X” size. In this case, it should have said the recipe yields 2 717g loaves. That way I would know not to use the sandwich bread shape or if I wanted to, to make sure to scale the recipe up to 10.7% to 1588g. I have had this same experience with a few other recipes, so now I know to pay more attention to the yield amount and the amount needed for certain loaf types. I baked this recipe and after 3 hours it barely rose to above the bread pan. This is unfortunate because the result is very small slices for sandwich bread.

The final result was very good. The bread has a nice crust, soft, moist interior and no crumb. I loved the addition of all the nuts and seeds. It added a nice, subtle, crunch. Like Peter says, it is great for PB&J. I can’t believe the nuts were all nicely incorporated into the dough and didn’t fall out.

I would rate the recipe 5 stars for taste, but 3 star for recipe accuracy for a total average of 4 stars. Next time I will just make sure I scale the recipe.